An old article I saved from my time in the PFF Fellows Program, when our topic of the year was "Second Life"

http://innovateonline.info/pdf/vol5_issue2/Using_Second_Life_with_Learning-Disabled_Students_in_Higher_Education.pdf 

In response to today's discussion, does *Bridging Social Capital* still count as Social Learning? ... ... ...  

So this is the academic life proposal that we were thinking of creating for the university. We were thinking of implementing it before the end of the spring semester for our department, and then for the entire school by next fall. In addition, there were other ideas we had since we originally wrote this. Like, we wanted

-a calendar for all events on campus, like GSC-sponsored events (of which there are like, 14 planned before the end of the semester), seminars, lectures, art-show openings, etc.
-An online repository for the new bi-monthly GSC magazine, The Zine
-And in addition to idea #4 on that list (Yellow Pages/Classifieds), we were thinking of using a sort of eHarmony like way of suggesting friends to other students. For example, you know how in Facebook, there's five boxes on the right-hand column? They are: Requests, Suggestions, Sponsored, Events, and Connect with Friends. The Suggestions box suggests friends for you based on the number of friends in common (sorta. it's actually based on the how many out of their total number of friends you have on common). Anyways, we want something like that for our artifact: Something that suggests connections for you. But instead on basing it off friends in common, we want the theme to be Intellectual Community. Academic Life. Scholarly Community, and whatnot. So we was thinking that what we were gonna do was have it based off of common research interests. That is, each student has a profile that says what their research interests/methods/skills are. And the artifact will suggests friends based on that. But the problem was, how do we get people to take the time to fill out that information? They already have enough work to worry about from their classes/research. So we thought that we'd have the students gradually fill out their profile's over a long period: Every time students log in, a prompt will ask them 1 or 2 questions before they can access their profile, or the other features in the artifact. Questions could be something like "Do you prefer qualitative or quantitative methods?" "What programming languages do you know?" "What topics interest you?" etc. And from filling out 1 or 2 questions each time they log in, as the tool gets a larger population, we'll be able to more accurately promote friendly/professional/academic networking through our tool.

BuddyPress (a plug-in for WordPress MU that allows WordPress to use more social networking features a la FaceBook): http://buddypress.org/

WordPress MU (multi-user variation of WordPress blogging software that we used for SISATSpace): http://mu.wordpress.org/ 

Here's the original proposal:

SISAT Academic Life Proposal

New Social Networking site for our school
We would like to build a new Social Networking site for our school by focusing on academic life first. We plan to bring it to campus-wide later. Right now we are in talks with Shamini Dias, the GSC president, and she's interested in it. If it's okay, we will have our own social networking site for our school and bring it to the entire university later. Here are our ideas:

1. Training, Tutorials, and Workshop Podcasts:
We will archive the Podcasts that we record, and then upload them to the site.

1.1 This will focus on fundamental topics in our school and some advanced topics that help students to conduct studies and research better. Some of tutorials that we propose are:

- NLP Programming in NetBeans by MJ (NLP class)

- Programming store procedures in Oracle by Hsinghuei Wang (Database class)

1.2 Share experiences about academic life and personal stories from previous students, current students, and faculty. Some ideas are:

* For first year student:
       - The difference between working for and presenting for workshops, poster sessions, conferences, and journal articles
       - How to develop ideas they presented as conference papers into journal articles
       - How to conduct research and how to publish papers (as opposed to what is taught in the IS360 series of classes, these would be personal stories from faculty and students who have experiences in publication)
       - How to register for classes, how to arrange their schedule, the order in which they should take classes, interesting classes from outside SISAT they could take for their elective, etc.
        
* For senior students:
       - How students come up with idea for their research, how they went about conducting their research, how they took advantage of personal connections to increase their sample size, the group dynamics when they collaborated with others (whether within or outside SISAT or CGU) with their research, how they juggled their personal life with their academic life while conducting the research, etc.
       - How to write grant proposals and get grant money (by faculty and students)
       - How to find jobs after you graduate (by alumni)

* For screening exam students:
     - We'd like to interview faculty to talk about strategies to approaching each question on the exam
     - Interviews with distinguished students who got the highest score when they took the exam or other students who have taken the exam, not only from the last year but from the earlier years too. For example, Nathan Garrett, Brian Thoms, Robert Judge, Chris Malek, and Trudi Miller.
     - Use Elluminate Web Conferencing to conduct live interviews. We will record the sessions and students who are interested can join the chat session and participate with students who have passed the screening exam.

2. Podcasts on 4 main labs

* We'd like to interview the directors of the four labs in our school (Terry and Lorne for SL^2, Tom Horan for Kay Center, etc.). The professors can give their labs’ mission statement and some basic ideas about what is going on in their labs, and what they expect from their student researchers. This can help the first year students to see the overall picture and make decisions on which lab they would like to join in their future academic life.
* We'd like to interview some lab members to talk about their projects and the activities they participate in with the lab, and their responsibilities within the lab.
* We'd like to get some basic information about their lab’s mission statement, their labs’ past and current projects and research, how many publications they’ve gotten, and what conferences they have organized (or plan to organize).

3. PhD Students Database: Student-Faculty directories
* This will keep data of professors and the students that they work together with on dissertations. This will be useful for current students who would like to see who works with whom, and what are their trends for conducting research. So, when we click the name of a professor, you can see who is under that professor's supervision and what their dissertation topic (if they have reached that stage) is.

4. Yellow Pages and Classifieds
In our previous SISAT Web site, we had a list of all PhD students, along with their email address and their research topic. We'd like to keep data of our PhD and Masters students and their research. We had the idea for a Classifieds section for research: If a student has some research ideas and would like to find other students to ask or work with, he or she can go to this page and put out an advertisement for his or her idea. For example, a student has a research idea but does not have the time to fully write up an article. Or a student is conducting research, but does not have much background in statistics, and would like help from a stats person to write up their analysis. They could put ads soliciting help from other students who are looking for research opportunities. This can be transdisciplinary: Students could be able to solicit ideas from other departments.

5. Community Blog
This blog will post what is going on in our school, department news, campus news, etc. (as we did on the Main Page of SISATSpace before).

6. Community Newsletter
We'd like to do a bi-annual newsletter. You can see an example from SBOS’s newsletter:
http://www.cgu.edu/PDFFiles/sbos/Spring2009Newsletter.pdf
We'd like to have a Faculty, Student, and Alumni Milestones section as in SBOS’s newsletter. This will keep readers up-to-date on the progress and successes of people in our school. It may be like The Flame, but it will be focus on our school. For example, last semester our school held the Persuasive Conference and the Claremont Robotics Competition. Some students and faculty got grants and some got publications. We should have all this in the newsletter, so we know what is being accomplished within our department, and can feel proud of it. We will feel closer with each other when we know each other’s story, and it may encourage us to learn more about their success and try to follow in their footsteps.

We can also include information on incoming students for each semester for students who would like to introduce themselves to the incoming student body, including name, country of origin, the program they are entering, and (if the permit it) their contact information. 

From (Measuring Sense of Community: Beyond Local Boundaries)

Perceived Sense of Community Scale (Chertok 1990)

Mission (Perception that a group has goals which transcend the goals of its individual members)

Connection (the perception that a group is ongoing and acknowledges its accepted members)

Reciprocal Responsibility (the perception that members both serve as resources for the group and receive responses to their individual needs)

Complementary variables

Social Support (Cohen, Mermelstein, Karmack and Hoberman, 1985)

Appraisal

Belonging

Tangible

Self-Esteem

Stress (Cohen, Kamarck, and Mermelstein, 1983)

Hope (via the Expected Balance Scale from Staats, 1989)

Pessimism - asses expected negative affect

Optimism - assess expected positive affect

So this is the academic life proposal that we were thinking of creating for the university. We were thinking of implementing it before the end of the spring semester for our department, and then for the entire school by next fall. In addition, there were other ideas we had since we originally wrote this. Like, we wanted

-a calendar for all events on campus, like GSC-sponsored events (of which there are like, 14 planned before the end of the semester), seminars, lectures, art-show openings, etc.
-An online repository for the new bi-monthly GSC magazine, The Zine
-And in addition to idea #4 on that list (Yellow Pages/Classifieds), we were thinking of using a sort of eHarmony like way of suggesting friends to other students. For example, you know how in Facebook, there's five boxes on the right-hand column? They are: Requests, Suggestions, Sponsored, Events, and Connect with Friends. The Suggestions box suggests friends for you based on the number of friends in common (sorta. it's actually based on the how many out of their total number of friends you have on common). Anyways, we want something like that for our artifact: Something that suggests connections for you. But instead on basing it off friends in common, we want the theme to be Intellectual Community. Academic Life. Scholarly Community, and whatnot. So we was thinking that what we were gonna do was have it based off of common research interests. That is, each student has a profile that says what their research interests/methods/skills are. And the artifact will suggests friends based on that. But the problem was, how do we get people to take the time to fill out that information? They already have enough work to worry about from their classes/research. So we thought that we'd have the students gradually fill out their profile's over a long period: Every time students log in, a prompt will ask them 1 or 2 questions before they can access their profile, or the other features in the artifact. Questions could be something like "Do you prefer qualitative or quantitative methods?" "What programming languages do you know?" "What topics interest you?" etc. And from filling out 1 or 2 questions each time they log in, as the tool gets a larger population, we'll be able to more accurately promote friendly/professional/academic networking through our tool.

BuddyPress (a plug-in for WordPress MU that allows WordPress to use more social networking features a la FaceBook): http://buddypress.org/

WordPress MU (multi-user variation of WordPress blogging software that we used for SISATSpace): http://mu.wordpress.org/ 

Here's the original proposal:

SISAT Academic Life Proposal

New Social Networking site for our school
We would like to build a new Social Networking site for our school by focusing on academic life first. We plan to bring it to campus-wide later. Right now we are in talks with Shamini Dias, the GSC president, and she's interested in it. If it's okay, we will have our own social networking site for our school and bring it to the entire university later. Here are our ideas:

1. Training, Tutorials, and Workshop Podcasts:
We will archive the Podcasts that we record, and then upload them to the site.

1.1 This will focus on fundamental topics in our school and some advanced topics that help students to conduct studies and research better. Some of tutorials that we propose are:

- NLP Programming in NetBeans by MJ (NLP class)

- Programming store procedures in Oracle by Hsinghuei Wang (Database class)

1.2 Share experiences about academic life and personal stories from previous students, current students, and faculty. Some ideas are:

* For first year student:
       - The difference between working for and presenting for workshops, poster sessions, conferences, and journal articles
       - How to develop ideas they presented as conference papers into journal articles
       - How to conduct research and how to publish papers (as opposed to what is taught in the IS360 series of classes, these would be personal stories from faculty and students who have experiences in publication)
       - How to register for classes, how to arrange their schedule, the order in which they should take classes, interesting classes from outside SISAT they could take for their elective, etc.
        
* For senior students:
       - How students come up with idea for their research, how they went about conducting their research, how they took advantage of personal connections to increase their sample size, the group dynamics when they collaborated with others (whether within or outside SISAT or CGU) with their research, how they juggled their personal life with their academic life while conducting the research, etc.
       - How to write grant proposals and get grant money (by faculty and students)
       - How to find jobs after you graduate (by alumni)

* For screening exam students:
     - We'd like to interview faculty to talk about strategies to approaching each question on the exam
     - Interviews with distinguished students who got the highest score when they took the exam or other students who have taken the exam, not only from the last year but from the earlier years too. For example, Nathan Garrett, Brian Thoms, Robert Judge, Chris Malek, and Trudi Miller.
     - Use Elluminate Web Conferencing to conduct live interviews. We will record the sessions and students who are interested can join the chat session and participate with students who have passed the screening exam.

2. Podcasts on 4 main labs

* We'd like to interview the directors of the four labs in our school (Terry and Lorne for SL^2, Tom Horan for Kay Center, etc.). The professors can give their labs’ mission statement and some basic ideas about what is going on in their labs, and what they expect from their student researchers. This can help the first year students to see the overall picture and make decisions on which lab they would like to join in their future academic life.
* We'd like to interview some lab members to talk about their projects and the activities they participate in with the lab, and their responsibilities within the lab.
* We'd like to get some basic information about their lab’s mission statement, their labs’ past and current projects and research, how many publications they’ve gotten, and what conferences they have organized (or plan to organize).

3. PhD Students Database: Student-Faculty directories
* This will keep data of professors and the students that they work together with on dissertations. This will be useful for current students who would like to see who works with whom, and what are their trends for conducting research. So, when we click the name of a professor, you can see who is under that professor's supervision and what their dissertation topic (if they have reached that stage) is.

4. Yellow Pages and Classifieds
In our previous SISAT Web site, we had a list of all PhD students, along with their email address and their research topic. We'd like to keep data of our PhD and Masters students and their research. We had the idea for a Classifieds section for research: If a student has some research ideas and would like to find other students to ask or work with, he or she can go to this page and put out an advertisement for his or her idea. For example, a student has a research idea but does not have the time to fully write up an article. Or a student is conducting research, but does not have much background in statistics, and would like help from a stats person to write up their analysis. They could put ads soliciting help from other students who are looking for research opportunities. This can be transdisciplinary: Students could be able to solicit ideas from other departments.

5. Community Blog
This blog will post what is going on in our school, department news, campus news, etc. (as we did on the Main Page of SISATSpace before).

6. Community Newsletter
We'd like to do a bi-annual newsletter. You can see an example from SBOS’s newsletter:
http://www.cgu.edu/PDFFiles/sbos/Spring2009Newsletter.pdf
We'd like to have a Faculty, Student, and Alumni Milestones section as in SBOS’s newsletter. This will keep readers up-to-date on the progress and successes of people in our school. It may be like The Flame, but it will be focus on our school. For example, last semester our school held the Persuasive Conference and the Claremont Robotics Competition. Some students and faculty got grants and some got publications. We should have all this in the newsletter, so we know what is being accomplished within our department, and can feel proud of it. We will feel closer with each other when we know each other’s story, and it may encourage us to learn more about their success and try to follow in their footsteps.

We can also include information on incoming students for each semester for students who would like to introduce themselves to the incoming student body, including name, country of origin, the program they are entering, and (if the permit it) their contact information. 

So this is the academic life proposal that we were thinking of creating for the university. We were thinking of implementing it before the end of the spring semester for our department, and then for the entire school by next fall. In addition, there were other ideas we had since we originally wrote this. Like, we wanted

-a calendar for all events on campus, like GSC-sponsored events (of which there are like, 14 planned before the end of the semester), seminars, lectures, art-show openings, etc.
-An online repository for the new bi-monthly GSC magazine, The Zine
-And in addition to idea #4 on that list (Yellow Pages/Classifieds), we were thinking of using a sort of eHarmony like way of suggesting friends to other students. For example, you know how in Facebook, there's five boxes on the right-hand column? They are: Requests, Suggestions, Sponsored, Events, and Connect with Friends. The Suggestions box suggests friends for you based on the number of friends in common (sorta. it's actually based on the how many out of their total number of friends you have on common). Anyways, we want something like that for our artifact: Something that suggests connections for you. But instead on basing it off friends in common, we want the theme to be Intellectual Community. Academic Life. Scholarly Community, and whatnot. So we was thinking that what we were gonna do was have it based off of common research interests. That is, each student has a profile that says what their research interests/methods/skills are. And the artifact will suggests friends based on that. But the problem was, how do we get people to take the time to fill out that information? They already have enough work to worry about from their classes/research. So we thought that we'd have the students gradually fill out their profile's over a long period: Every time students log in, a prompt will ask them 1 or 2 questions before they can access their profile, or the other features in the artifact. Questions could be something like "Do you prefer qualitative or quantitative methods?" "What programming languages do you know?" "What topics interest you?" etc. And from filling out 1 or 2 questions each time they log in, as the tool gets a larger population, we'll be able to more accurately promote friendly/professional/academic networking through our tool.

Here's the original proposal:

SISAT Academic Life Proposal

New Social Networking site for our school
We would like to build a new Social Networking site for our school by focusing on academic life first. We plan to bring it to campus-wide later. Right now we are in talks with Shamini Dias, the GSC president, and she's interested in it. If it's okay, we will have our own social networking site for our school and bring it to the entire university later. Here are our ideas:

1. Training, Tutorials, and Workshop Podcasts:
We will archive the Podcasts that we record, and then upload them to the site.

1.1 This will focus on fundamental topics in our school and some advanced topics that help students to conduct studies and research better. Some of tutorials that we propose are:

- NLP Programming in NetBeans by MJ (NLP class)

- Programming store procedures in Oracle by Hsinghuei Wang (Database class)

1.2 Share experiences about academic life and personal stories from previous students, current students, and faculty. Some ideas are:

* For first year student:
       - The difference between working for and presenting for workshops, poster sessions, conferences, and journal articles
       - How to develop ideas they presented as conference papers into journal articles
       - How to conduct research and how to publish papers (as opposed to what is taught in the IS360 series of classes, these would be personal stories from faculty and students who have experiences in publication)
       - How to register for classes, how to arrange their schedule, the order in which they should take classes, interesting classes from outside SISAT they could take for their elective, etc.
        
* For senior students:
       - How students come up with idea for their research, how they went about conducting their research, how they took advantage of personal connections to increase their sample size, the group dynamics when they collaborated with others (whether within or outside SISAT or CGU) with their research, how they juggled their personal life with their academic life while conducting the research, etc.
       - How to write grant proposals and get grant money (by faculty and students)
       - How to find jobs after you graduate (by alumni)

* For screening exam students:
     - We'd like to interview faculty to talk about strategies to approaching each question on the exam
     - Interviews with distinguished students who got the highest score when they took the exam or other students who have taken the exam, not only from the last year but from the earlier years too. For example, Nathan Garrett, Brian Thoms, Robert Judge, Chris Malek, and Trudi Miller.
     - Use Elluminate Web Conferencing to conduct live interviews. We will record the sessions and students who are interested can join the chat session and participate with students who have passed the screening exam.

2. Podcasts on 4 main labs

* We'd like to interview the directors of the four labs in our school (Terry and Lorne for SL^2, Tom Horan for Kay Center, etc.). The professors can give their labs’ mission statement and some basic ideas about what is going on in their labs, and what they expect from their student researchers. This can help the first year students to see the overall picture and make decisions on which lab they would like to join in their future academic life.
* We'd like to interview some lab members to talk about their projects and the activities they participate in with the lab, and their responsibilities within the lab.
* We'd like to get some basic information about their lab’s mission statement, their labs’ past and current projects and research, how many publications they’ve gotten, and what conferences they have organized (or plan to organize).

3. PhD Students Database: Student-Faculty directories
* This will keep data of professors and the students that they work together with on dissertations. This will be useful for current students who would like to see who works with whom, and what are their trends for conducting research. So, when we click the name of a professor, you can see who is under that professor's supervision and what their dissertation topic (if they have reached that stage) is.

4. Yellow Pages and Classifieds
In our previous SISAT Web site, we had a list of all PhD students, along with their email address and their research topic. We'd like to keep data of our PhD and Masters students and their research. We had the idea for a Classifieds section for research: If a student has some research ideas and would like to find other students to ask or work with, he or she can go to this page and put out an advertisement for his or her idea. For example, a student has a research idea but does not have the time to fully write up an article. Or a student is conducting research, but does not have much background in statistics, and would like help from a stats person to write up their analysis. They could put ads soliciting help from other students who are looking for research opportunities. This can be transdisciplinary: Students could be able to solicit ideas from other departments.

5. Community Blog
This blog will post what is going on in our school, department news, campus news, etc. (as we did on the Main Page of SISATSpace before).

6. Community Newsletter
We'd like to do a bi-annual newsletter. You can see an example from SBOS’s newsletter:
http://www.cgu.edu/PDFFiles/sbos/Spring2009Newsletter.pdf
We'd like to have a Faculty, Student, and Alumni Milestones section as in SBOS’s newsletter. This will keep readers up-to-date on the progress and successes of people in our school. It may be like The Flame, but it will be focus on our school. For example, last semester our school held the Persuasive Conference and the Claremont Robotics Competition. Some students and faculty got grants and some got publications. We should have all this in the newsletter, so we know what is being accomplished within our department, and can feel proud of it. We will feel closer with each other when we know each other’s story, and it may encourage us to learn more about their success and try to follow in their footsteps.

We can also include information on incoming students for each semester for students who would like to introduce themselves to the incoming student body, including name, country of origin, the program they are entering, and (if the permit it) their contact information.